Posts about career

I finished my PhD in computer science more than three years ago. Now that I have a little bit of mental distance from my PhD time, I'm going through my research diary to see if there's stuff in there that can be useful for other people.

Apparently I'm incapable of writing short-form texts, so here is part 1. ;)

A friend of mine is currently looking for a new job. She was asking around for a few good tips on job hunting. I spent quite some time looking for a job right after finishing my PhD in 2022, so I had ample to share. After penning down these tips on irc, we decided that storing them in a more persistent, public place might be useful for others as well.

I wrote this list of tips for networking just after I visited my first conference, where networking was supereasy! And it was FUN! Although Troopers 2017 was an industry conference, the tips should work fine for academic conferences too.

I talked to so many interesting people, people working in infosec from all over the globe. I even managed to help some of them, by answering questions on social media, introducing people to each other, and pointing people to good self-education resources on the internet. I love to help people, so that made the networking activity feel very natural for me. It was not like the picture I had in my head at all (people in suits loudly talking about themselves while scattering business cards at random). I also loved to exchange horror stories about employers or infosec-gone-wrong. And the most fun thing is to form a spontaneous group of conference-friends and explore the local cuisine.

I was very lucky to get a job immediately after graduation. In one month, I went from hippy-vibed Nijmegen and a no-rules-just-write schedule to the imposing The Hague, to sit in an open-floor-plan style office from 9-to-6. It's been quite an experience.

As I was finishing the last chapters of my thesis in September 2015, preparing slides for my final presentation and fighting with a particular tricky LaTeX module, a voice in the back of my mind reminded me that I needed to find a job.

Part of me believed that a suitable PhD position would turn up. But the more time I spent doing research for my master thesis, the more I wanted to do something else for a while. Something not quite like research. But what?